


Cold As Stone

by shirawords



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: (how in the hell does one write furry Christianity I'm Jewish and I tried but oof), Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Alternate Universe - Politics, Cold War, Espionage, Gen, Vague religious crisis, as I am wont to do, dramatic abuse of the comma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:02:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25945540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shirawords/pseuds/shirawords
Summary: When he finally got his first long-term assignment, he almost broke down and cried in the commander’s office. After all he’d done for Narnia, and then for England, how could the Lion still require penance? Why was his first serious assignment for the remnant of the Special Operations Executive a long-term posting based out of Prague to track and report on the activities of the Winter Soldier?Or, Edmund and all his to-do with the White Witch and eternal winter + the Winter Soldier just makes sense, you know?
Comments: 5
Kudos: 32





	Cold As Stone

When he finally got his first long-term assignment, he almost broke down and cried in the commander’s office. Twenty-some years as a reigning monarch had taught him better control of himself than that, so he didn’t let the tears come until later, sitting on the toilet in his dingy flat in the less fashionable part of London, to keep his two flat-mates from hearing over the running shower. When he got his assignment, his only noticeable reaction was a slight pause before taking hold of the thick packet of documents he was to read once dismissed, and he was pretty sure that no one in the office noticed even that. But it was too much, really; after all he’d done for Narnia, and then for England, how could the Lion still require penance? He’d been forgiven, Aslan had told him so, and he’d done his damnedest to believe it and act in accordance. Why, then, was his first serious assignment for the remnant of the Special Operations Executive a long-term posting based out of Prague to track and report on the activities of the Winter Soldier?

After he’d cried himself out, and stuck his head in the shower for appearance’s sake, Edmund began his packing with a grim sense of determination. If this was what his country required of him, he’d do it with no (outward) complaint. He was to move into one of the rooms in the definitely-not-SOE Eastern European command center, so he could keep his assignment file with him outside of official meetings without courting a security breach. Thanks to Susan, he’d gotten a unit with its own bathroom attached—there were perks to having an older sister in the high ranks of British intelligence—and, he suspected, a home base in Prague instead of one of the rougher cities on the nebulous border between the Soviet states and everyone else. The Winter Soldier was a Russian operative, but German was Edmund’s best language, and he could get by as a German refugee that the Czech government had missed in its mass expulsion of ethnic Germans after the War. If this was his penance, he thought ironically, he could have been stuck with much worse. He finished his packing quickly—he’d be getting a new, more appropriate wardrobe, and personal memorabilia were highly discouraged as security hazards—and went to sleep on Peter’s old sheets, dry-eyed and oddly calm. He’d fought Winter’s soldiers before and won, and he was better prepared this time. He’d be fine.

*********************************************

The next month was a dizzying rush of documents, interviews, language instruction, and shooting practice. Susan was the archer, not him, but he managed a gun well enough to satisfy his instructors. Unsurprisingly, he was excused from hand-to-hand and knife combat review. He spent hours studying the Winter Soldier’s past operations, and began to get a feel for the man’s work. It was bloody and horrible, of course, murder was always horrible, but there was a sort of grace behind the violence. Every operation was completed quickly, with little collateral damage that would attract attention, and the Winter Soldier completely disappeared after each one. His personal profile was no help—the Winter Soldier had apparently sprung up out of nowhere one day, a perfect assassin with no messy ties to the rest of the world. The more time Edmund spent with the Winter Soldier, the more invested he became in his assignment. 

He was reminded of a story that Susan absolutely should not have told him, about a radio operator who worked with the codebreakers at Bletchley. Susan had been stationed there after coming back from France to report more fully on her work with the resistance prior to D-Day, and had insinuated herself into all of the little cliques and social circles in the way only a queen knew how. One night, the radio girls invited Susan out to drink and flirt, and she’d wheedled a tale or two out of them. This operator, it seemed, had been transcribing the communication from one of her German counterparts for years. She was sure it was the same German operator, with the same brisk style of transmission, who never made a mistake with his Morse code. She’d laughed, Susan had told him, looking a bit chagrined. Was it possible to fall in love with the enemy over the radio, she’d asked, just from the way he typed? None of the men at Bletchley were so neat and quick in their radio work, and she’d always loved competence.

Edmund, too, loved competence. It was always disappointing to see in an enemy, and Edmund could tell his work was cut out for him. But it was refreshing, in a way, to have a real challenge in front of him again. As his flight across the Channel drew nearer, Edmund began to feel more sure of himself. This was, after all, what he’d learned to do as a reigning monarch, and he only had one target to track, not a dozen foreign nations and all their major political players. He could do this, and if the Lion meant to punish him, Edmund would take his punishment and turn it into something useful. He would serve his current country, past betrayals be damned. 

*********************************************

The train into Prague was late. Edmund met his handler at a crowded bar near the Charles Bridge, apologizing, but the man waved him to silence, stating that the train was always late and that Edmund—now Klaus—should get used to it. An unremarkable, mousy-looking character, the handler gave him instructions on how to deliver his reports, information on his new job with a kosher butcher whose children had been saved in the Kindertransport, two phone numbers to call in case of emergency, and a set of hollow buttons to compliment the cyanide pills he’d gotten from the SOE. The meeting was brief, and conducted entirely in German. Edmund was soon settled into his shabby flat, where he quickly established himself as a young butcher’s assistant with a small but vibrant window garden. He brought home the trimmings and organs from the shop to share with the old ladies, traded his parsley for laundry services, and generally kept to himself. His Czech slowly improved, but (deliberately) never got good enough for real conversation, and no one in his building spoke any real German. Despite the constant edge of danger that dogged his every motion—he was, after all, a spy in a hostile country and barely spoke the language—his new life soon became routine enough to be dull. Edmund knew better than to wish for excitement, because in this line of work, excitement usually landed you dead in a ditch, but he could feel himself getting antsy.

It was a long time before Edmund had anything real to put into his bi-weekly reports. But when excitement came, it was clear why the British government had seen fit to assign an agent solely to watching the Winter Soldier. When it came, it was big.

*********************************************

Edmund had more trouble explaining his sudden decision to go on holiday to the woman who did his laundry than to his boss at the butcher’s. That was, of course, why he’d been placed with the butcher, because the man owed the British and didn’t ask questions. Edmund was granted a week of leave without pay, with the possibility of a second week upon request. He told the laundry woman, who lived a floor below him with her three children, that he was off to visit his sick grandmother in East Berlin. He even bought a ticket to Germany, to cover his tracks. Early the next morning, he slipped out of the ugly concrete block of an apartment building with only a small briefcase and his coat, and made his way by train to Romania. 

Word of the sudden assassination of a Romanian general and his entire staff in Bucharest had not yet reached Prague, so no one at the city's central train station questioned him. Once he got to Bucharest, though, every bit of gossip he could understand was about the event. Edmund let a room in a run-down motel, made contact with the SOE operative in charge of Romania while sitting next to the man in church, and began to plan. It took him two days, a terrifying climb across the underside of a bridge over the Dambovita River, and a frankly exorbitant set of bribes to get to the scene of the crime and see for himself what the gossip had expanded in every telling. 

He made it to the general’s office building—a beautiful piece of architecture left largely untouched by Anglo-American bombers—a little after three in the morning. Of course, the bodies had been removed days ago, but the bloodstains would still be there, as well as any important paperwork that the Soviet clean-up crew hadn’t already burned. Edmund slipped behind a line of police tape and a set of half-asleep guards with no trouble at all and tied newspapers over his shoes to hide his footprints. Based on his small forensic knowledge, he thought he could confirm that yes, twenty-seven people had been killed in broad daylight in a government building a little over a week ago, with no trace of the perpetrator left behind. The rumors were correct, then, and the Winter Soldier had resurfaced to make yet another brutal and effective hit. 

The office where the general had gasped his last breath was a disaster. Papers were strewn about the desk, several filing cabinets were lying empty on the floor, and pieces of what had been a glass chandelier littered the carpet. The mess looked studied to Edmund’s eye, though, as if someone had put it there on purpose instead of creating it on accident. Had the Winter Soldier been after something in particular, and created the mess to cover up what he’d taken? Had he used the mess to slip in some damning document that would later justify the general’s death? Given that he was in the dark, unable to touch anything, and didn’t read Romanian, Edmund had no way of knowing. He left after a half hour, just before the guards were scheduled to change, and decided to come back the next night.

He was didn’t make it back for three days, choosing not to risk it in the rain that turned the city streets into muddy galleries of footprints. After the rain stopped and the mud caked over, Edmund snuck back to the building via a different route. The general’s office had a spectacular view through a set of glass French doors that let the moonlight—and probably the Winter Soldier—in and illuminated the room enough for Edmund’s night vision, which had been honed by Great Cats and Raptors in his first adulthood in Narnia. He’d hardly been there for five minutes when he heard footsteps.

The Great Cats had taught him how to climb, too, and Edmund made it onto the arched ceiling’s support beams by way of the doorknob on the (closed) door to the hallway well before the door was opened. Two men dressed in all black entered, muttering to each other in Russian. Edmund’s Russian was much better than his Romanian, and he was surprised to realize that these men were not guards responding to some noise he’d carelessly made in his entrance to the building. No, these men seemed to have “taken care of the guards,” if his understanding of the idiom was correct. Wait—they’d had the guards taken care of by someone else, and they were upset at the implication that they needed his help for a simple burglary like this one. Balancing on his beam, Edmund turned his lips up in an ironic smile. These idiots clearly did need the help, as they’d entered the room talking and hadn’t bothered to search it for listeners, either mechanical or human, before spilling the beans of their operation. Then he heard the word “zima,” and his smiled died. “Zima” meant winter.   
One of the incompetent burglars, fumbling with his pockets, swore. The other went to the door and stuck his head out, saying something Edmund couldn’t quite catch. And then, without the fanfare he’d have expected for such a mysterious dealer of death, the Winter Soldier himself walked into the general’s office. He was shorter than Edmund had expected, and stockier, and one of his arms glinted silver in the moonlight. He had shoulder-length hair, which Edmund hadn’t seen much of since Narnia. He carried three guns that Edmund could see, and almost certainly had as many knives hidden on his person as Edmund did. Silently—too silently, Edmund thought only Cats could walk like that—the Winter Soldier moved to the dead general’s desk and opened a drawer. He accepted something from the swearing burglar and began to build what Edmund thought was probably a bomb.

Well, Edmund thought dryly to himself, that’s one question answered and another one raised. If they’d sent the Winter Soldier himself to blow up the office, Russian intelligence wanted to bury something, not plant it. And, now that the burial was in motion, how in the hell would Edmund make it out unnoticed? The burglars he could deal with practically in his sleep, but Edmund was not happy with his chances against the Winter Soldier. While his movements were strangely jerky, the Winter Soldier was quick and confident as his shining silver arm moved over the bomb. Edmund sighed mentally and decided to turn his mind to something more useful than contemplating his certain death if he had to fight his way out. He began to scoot across the beam he was on towards the French doors, hoping like hell he wasn’t casting much of a shadow. He figured he’d have a minute or two between when the bomb was finished and when it went off. He’d use that time the same way the Winter Soldier would—fleeing the building. It’d hurt, but Edmund could survive a few jumps from balcony to balcony before he reached the street.

The two burglars were still chattering to each other. Edmund’s Russian, which he had thought was passable, seemed to be failing him. Apparently, the Winter Soldier had been…melted? for this mission. It was unnecessary, one burglar told the other. They’d barely frozen him back at headquarters when new orders came down to take him back out for an operation even a baby could do. Sneering, the burglar turned toward the Winter Soldier. Was he still cold, the burglar asked, or had he got all the ice off by now? Edmund furrowed his eyebrows. There had been rumors of the Russians freezing their operatives when they were done with them, but everyone in the intelligence community had taken that to mean the Russians were killing them. A bit wasteful, perhaps, but as good a way to prevent leaks as any other. No one had thought the Russians were actually freezing people, and apparently thawing them out to send on missions. No one would have believed it. No one except a man who’d seen fantastical creatures in a magical land turned to stone at the touch of a witch’s wand. 

Had he not been in a situation where making noise meant certain death, Edmund would have laughed aloud. Aslan had not sent him this assignment as penance. No, the Lion had led him here to share his redemption. He was called to be Wand-breaker once more. He would rescue the Winter Soldier from the clutches of this new White Witch as he himself had once been rescued. And after that? Well, even the worst traitors can mend.

**Author's Note:**

> I got a prompt for an Edmund/Bucky romantic comedy fic, which will never happen because the only romance I can write is angst and also I don't really like Marvel. But the Winter Soldier/White Witch's winter was dangling in front of me so I wrote some gritty espionage about it.
> 
> Inspiration for Edmund's characterization in this fic comes from rthstewart's Narnia 'verse--go read her stuff, it's amazing.
> 
> Historically, I did no research at all into the shape of British intelligence during early Cold War. I do know a bit more about Czechoslovakia's mass deportations of ethnic Germans after the war. For more information about that, I recommend the book Cleansing the Czechoslovak Borderlands by Eagle Glassheim.
> 
> I have absolutely no idea, and very little concern, about this fic's relationship with Marvel canon. I am very much not a Marvel person, but this crossover was too good to pass up.


End file.
